Gritty, raw and bleak. How often have you read such adjectives applied to a British film set on a rundown estate where drugs, drunkenness and loveless sex are the norm. Such dirty realism has become another British cinema genre to go alongside the white-flannels period film and geezer gangster movie. Now adding to this moody miserablism is Andrea Arnold’s Cannes-praised Red Road.

In a striking performance of bottled-up emotion, Kate Dickie plays Jackie, a widowed security-firm operator of Glasgow’s myriad CCTV cameras, who seems as emotionally disengaged from the world as the grainy silent dramas being played out on the bank of monitors before her. One day she spots Clyde (Tony Curran), a newly released ex-con with a past sin that we gradually suspect traumatically links him with Jackie. This sighting sends her into a spiral of illicit surveillance that leads her to Red Road, a grim clump of tower blocks where Clyde lives with a violent flatmate (Martin Compston) and his girlfriend (Natalie Press), and to insinuate herself into his life for reasons that become clear only towards the end.

The film is often as forbidding as its moody Glasgow setting, a graffiti- covered, litter-strewn city of bleak high-rises and desolate waste ground. It is also filled with pent-up feelings that reveal their origins only with time while Arnold uses ambient sound and Robby Ryan’s hand-held camera, bathing an often nocturnal world in bilious yellows and reds, to create a slow-burn suspense. Yet her screenplay never matches her evocative visuals. The long build-up yields to a rushed final 20 minutes that leaves one perplexed as to how Jackie’s grief, desire for revenge and sexuality have interacted to prompt her actions.

Such a melodramatic rush after a low-key prelude is very Lars von Trier, which perhaps isn’t so surprising when one knows that Red Road is the first in a Scottish-set trilogy by first-time feature directors that is being co-produced by the Danish maverick’s company and will feature the same characters. How they will turn out is anybody’s guess, but Arnold has certainly got the project off to a striking, well-acted start.

IAN JOHNS

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